I am a fourth-year PhD student in the College of Engineering at Northeastern University. I am a member of MAGICS Lab (Multi AGent Intelligent Complex Systems), and my advisor is Babak Heydari.
My research interest is at the intersection of Applied Artificial Intelligence and Social Science. Currently, my focus is on analyzing the causal effect of system-level treatments on users' interaction patterns in digital platforms: who is more affected by ChatGPT, what type of users, and why?
A Few Highlights
A few recent milestones, talks, and awards I'd like to share:
Collaborated in designing and teaching an online course for Engineering Management master’s students at Northeastern and Coursera.
Another photo of the online course production process.
Modeled a hybrid GRU–Transformer to forecast (1-hour ahead) an adverse medical outcome after cardiac surgery.
Recognized for excellence in research.
Selected for a plenary talk for our work on online collaboration patterns at the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) (20 selected out of ~700 submissions).
A photo of MAGICS Lab members!
Best Presentation Award at CESUN 2025: Modeling Decentralized Recovery in Sociotechnical Systems using Strategic Network Dynamics.
Presenting our work at INFORMS 2024.
Me explaining our network modeling of Wikipedia editors collaboration, applying NLP for their edits similarity.
About Me
Academic Background:
- PhD candidate in Industrial Engineering: Northeastern University, Boston, MA (2022–2026).
- Graduate certificate in Data Analytics Engineering: Northeastern University, Boston, MA (2022–2026).
- Master’s in Industrial Engineering: K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (2017–2020).
- Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering: University of Alzahra, Tehran, Iran (2013–2017).
Experiences:
- AI Researcher: Harvard Medical School – Nezami Lab. I completed my 2025 summer internship there and am wrapping up two applied AI in healthcare papers.
- Graduate Teaching Assistant: Engineering Management master’s-level course at Northeastern’s College of Engineering.
- Systems and Processes Analyst: Before starting my PhD and moving to the US, I worked in industry for four years, gaining experience in process mining, data mining, dashboard design, product design, project management, and cross-functional collaboration with product managers and software development teams.
Note: My legal name is Negin, but I also go by Megan (I realized it is just easier to say “a coffee for Megan” at cafés in the US).
Research Interests
My research focuses on the intersection of AI / statistics and social science. I am particularly interested in:
- Modeling / forecasting user behaviors and adverse system outcomes: Generative AI (Transformers, CNNs, RNNs, LSTM, GRU, LLMs) and classic ML (XGBoost, KNN, Naive Bayes, regression, …).
- Estimating the causal effect of system-level treatments: Using causal inference (regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, event study, synthetic control models).
Selected Publications
A selection of my publications. For a complete and up-to-date list, please see my Google Scholar profile.